


we hunger so for vicious things

by consumptive_sphinx



Category: Glowfic and Related Works
Genre: Knifeplay, M/M, Masochism, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 11:19:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17703371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consumptive_sphinx/pseuds/consumptive_sphinx
Summary: z loves you.





	we hunger so for vicious things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rainworthy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rainworthy/gifts).



> cleaned this up and fixed some character drift issues.   
> happy birthday <33

The video seems innocuous — a with an opening frame of a cute gothy boy smiling, followed by a hundred-word screed about how horrible the video is that doesn't actually say anything about it. Sasha reads the screed, checks the tags to see if it's anything really horrible, but doesn't see any content warnings — clicks on it. The guy really is cute, and he mostly just wants to see what the fuss was about. 

It starts with a striptease, because of course it does, this is tumblr. And the boy is really, really cute.  _ You'll regret watching this, _ the comment had said, but Sasha is really not regretting it. 

Then the boy in the video pulls out a knife.

It is, admittedly, a gorgeous knife, rainbow and iridescent. And the boy in the video moans when he bleeds.

_ You should stop watching this, _ something in Sasha says. He ignores it.

He moans when he bleeds and he bleeds in neatly-made, evenly-spaced rows of cuts on his torso, on his inner thighs. He talks through each row, breath hitching each time the knife lands. Sasha gently, gently puts the side of his finger against the places where the boy's knife lands — he shouldn't be enjoying this, this isn’t a safe thing to be so fascinated by, and he  _ doesn't care —  _

The boy moans when he bleeds. By the end of the video his thighs and his arms and his torso and the skin of his throat are cut to ribbons, and his head is tilted back and he isn't talking anymore — Sasha makes soft torn whimpering noises every time the blade lands, Sasha's thighs are aching in sympathy pain, it — it might be the best thing he's ever felt — 

The boy smiles at the camera. The video ends. 

Sasha's throat is dry. He deletes the caption when he reblogs.

Sasha checks the source. The original poster was the writer of the hundred-word caption, not the boy in the video, unfortunately, but their whole blog is just videos that all have an opening frame of the same cute goth-looking boy, sometimes with knives or lighters or whips or what looks like a potted stinging nettle already in the frame, with 100-300 word captions that say nothing about the video except that it's horrible. 

He shouldn't. At the very least he should make a sideblog for it. 

By the end of the night he's watched five more — his whole body hurts in what has to be a sympathy ache but feels like something more physical than that and he wants it to hurt  _ more _ — he follows a source link and finds the boy's website,  _ zlovesyou _ — 

— this needs to stop, he realizes when the screen goes blank as it's loading. He needs to stop. He closes his laptop and shoves it under his bed.

  
  


The next morning Sasha has class and he can't focus, can't concentrate, can't think of anything but the boy's face when he pressed the blade of a knife to his thigh.

He knows his eyes are glazed over, he's taking notes like always but he barely knows what they say — Marlo taps him on the shoulder and asks if he's okay and all he can do is nod —  _ god _ he wants that knife. Any knife, really, all he has is a shitty Swiss Army knife he got for his tenth birthday, but still — he'll get home in six hours, he can use it then. In five hours, in three, in one. 

He gets home. Takes his clothes off and sits in the bath, for this, locks the bathroom door. Puts headphones on and plays the most recent video and takes a knife and gently, gently slides it across his upper thigh. Not at the femoral artery — he doesn't want to die he just wants to  _ hurt _ — it hurts. 

It hurts and it's perfect, he bleeds and suddenly  _ he's _ perfect.

He cuts and bleeds and cuts and bleeds, he pinches his thighs so he'll bleed more, he sits up and watches Z and shivers and cuts again — he bites the back of his hand so he won't moan too loud — an hour slips past. An hour and a half. 

Eventually he pauses between videos and notices he feels strange, lightheaded. He stands up and immediately feels dizzy. He sits down again. Takes a washcloth and meticulously washes every cut, stands just long enough to grab bandages and gauze from the cupboard and wraps them around his thighs. 

Sasha shuts off his phone. He waits for a couple of minutes before he stands up again. Goes to the kitchen and gets himself — not water, don't they give you juice after you give blood? — orange juice and five cookies and he eats them all at once.  _ Then _ water. He goes to the bathroom again and changes his gauze. He goes to his room and sits down on the bed and swears to himself he won't open that website again. 

He doesn't open it for the rest of the day. It's in the back of his mind all the time — the gasps at each cut, the way Z keeps talking around his own moans, the memory of the sympathy ache, the very real pain in his thighs when he stands, when he walks, when he puts his jeans back on — but it isn't in front of his eyes. 

He takes the Swiss Army knife and goes into the backyard and throws it as hard as he can; it lodges in a tree where he won't be able to get to it. 

  
  


He has class again the next day. The pain is enough to ground him, the effort of hiding the hurt is enough to make him concentrate on something other than the memory of Z's voice when he came from being cut, but it isn't enough to let him focus on math, or Russian, or history. Nothing would be enough for that. 

Marlo's worried about him again. It's not hard to tell. Sasha brushes him off; what else could he do? 

(He could show him. He could cut his thighs open and let Marlo see how beautiful it is to  _ bleed  _ —) 

It's so so hard but he doesn't open that website, doesn't go back to that tumblr blog. Doesn't look at the — how many was it — he's  _ not _ going to go back and count — videos he reblogged. When he gets home from school he doesn't even try to climb the tree and get his knife back. The knives in the kitchen are beautiful. He doesn't touch them, he doesn't trust himself. He doesn't open his laptop,  _ he doesn't trust himself.  _

He tries to do his homework. His mind keeps wandering. Not wandering, it's directed, it always goes right back to the same place, it keeps going back to Z and the videos and his knives and the blood running down his skin and the moments in the bathtub when he bled and everything felt  _ right.  _

He — doesn't — he  _ can't _ — what if he  _ dies, _ what if he gets  _ caught, _ what if — 

(Would it matter if he was caught? They don't  _ see,  _ how beautiful it is — he could show them —) 

He makes it through that day and then another and then it's the weekend, no structure no school no classmates no  _ nothing _ to make him think about something other than how good it felt to hurt. How strangely beautiful Z’s videos are. How very sure he is, somewhere deeper than conscious knowledge can question, that Z loves him. 

He doesn't — he can't — what if — does it matter, he feels like something is itching under his skin, he needs to cut it out cut it off cut it  _ away _ — maybe he could watch and not have a knife near him, he can't possibly bleed too much if he isn't bleeding at all — just one video, just one, and he won't have a knife with him, what will it hurt — 

He opens the site again. He presses play and it feels — _right —_ it's _perfect,_ it's everything he wants, it's perfect — he doesn't hurt himself, there's the sympathy ache again but nothing else — he doesn't have anything sharp anywhere near him, he was careful, he was _so_ careful, just one more, he'll be _so_ _careful_ — 

By the end of the second video he's biting his lip. He notices but it feels wrong to stop so he doesn't — by the end of the third he's digging his fingernails into his skin, it's perfect, it's so perfect — why was he going to deny himself this — he's home alone, he can moan as loud as he wants to, Z flashes a grin at him and Sasha might be a little bit in love — 

When the sixth video ends it's three in the morning. Sasha closes his laptop and closes his eyes and smiles and settles into bed, only vaguely aware of the blood that wells up in the scratches on his arms, only vaguely aware of the blood underneath his fingernails, and dreams of the sounds Z made. 

  
  


Marlo comes over on Sunday afternoon, like he always does, Sasha’s pretty Southern boy; Marlo comes over on Sunday afternoon after church and kisses Sasha with that honey-sweet mouth of his and lays him out on the bed and unbuttons his shirt and pulls down his jeans and then stops cold. 

“Sasha, sweetheart,” and his voice is shaking, “what's this?” 

Down the insides of Sasha's thighs are dozens of thin cuts, closely spaced, neat and even and perfect. He searches for an answer that doesn't sound insane — Marlo looks up at him, wide eyed and horrified and pitying, and Sasha looks back down and finally says “Marlo, it's not — I'm not —” 

“You clearly are,” and Marlo sounds half-pleading. “Sasha, please, tell me what's wrong —” 

“Nothing’s wrong,” he says, more emphatically. “Nothing’s wrong, Marlo, it’s —” what can he say, what can he possibly say —  _ oh. _ “There’s this video, please, it’ll make sense, just — watch it with me? Please?” 

Marlo looks at him wide eyed and pitying again, but nods, quick and tight. They settle together, Marlo against the headboard and Sasha leaning back against his chest, Sasha’s laptop in front of both of them. 

He opens the first video he’d watched. Marlo is tense and uncomfortable through the striptease, tenses further when the knife comes out; Sasha can feel the set of his shoulders, can practically feel the look on his face. Sasha’s breath hitches at each cut, still, again. Z keeps talking, keeps smiling at the camera — as the video goes on Marlo gets less tense, gets clingier, wraps his arms around Sasha’s waist and presses one hand against the cuts on Sasha’s thigh. 

When it ends, Sasha looks over his shoulder. Marlo is still wide eyed, but not in horror anymore. 

“…Can we watch the next one?” Marlo says, in a very small voice. 

Sasha smiles. Clicks next. Relaxes against his boyfriend, and settles in. 

  
  


Marlo is avoiding him. 

It takes Sasha a few days to notice — he'd been glazed and glassy eyed too, the first day, when the only thing he could think of was the knife he'd had waiting back home — but Marlo is avoiding him, not making eye contact in class and not answering or even checking his texts and always needing to be in the library between them. By Tuesday it's noticeable; by Wednesday he's worried, and it isn't until Thursday after Marlo’s track practice that Sasha is able to catch him alone and with no readily available excuses to leave. 

“Are you okay?” Sasha says without preamble. 

Marlo won't meet his eyes. “I shouldn't be alone with you.” He tries to leave. Sasha blocks his way, which is an asshole move but Marlo  _ won't talk to him. _

“Why not?” 

“I keep —” he grimaces. Tries to walk again. This time Sasha walks with him. “I keep thinking. About that video.” 

Sasha's quiet, keeps his face at the encouraging end of neutral. 

“I keep thinking about — wanting to hurt you.” Marlo says the last bit all in one breath, looking down and away from Sasha. His cheeks are a bright burning pink. “I shouldn’t be alone with you,  _ you _ shouldn’t be alone with  _ me, _ I’m — I keep worrying I’m going to hurt you, and then it stops being a worry and starts being a  _ fantasy, _ I’m so, so sorry —” 

“Love.” Sasha has been trying not to interrupt, but. “Love, don’t be sorry.” He stops walking, takes Marlo’s hands. “You saw my legs.  _ I want you to hurt me. _ Tomorrow you are going to come over, and we’re going to watch a video together, and then you’re going to beat me up. And you’re going to love it, and I’m going to love it, and it will be fine, and I will be fine.” 

(He… isn’t normally that outwardly certain. Not about sex and not about anything.)

(Fuck it, he’ll worry about that later.) 

  
  


Marlo comes over on Friday night. Sasha sets up a camera, not because he has any particular plans, but just because it feels like he should. 

Marlo brings a hunting knife. It’s gorgeous. He doesn't even have to touch Sasha with it for Sasha to moan aloud. 

…that doesn’t mean he doesn’t touch Sasha with it, you understand. 

  
  


Sasha makes a sideblog. Calls it a tribute and links to zlovesyou in the description. He uploads the video. Instead of a proper description he links to zlovesyou again in the caption. The thumbnail is of him and Marlo looking each other in the eye, both of them nervous-but-excited; there’s no hint that by the end Sasha will be bleeding from dozens of cuts on his sides and sobbing and leaning against Marlo and smiling like he’s never felt anything better in his life. 

By the next morning it has two hundred notes, only a third of which are outraged. 


End file.
